I've put together a version of the Balance Mod that will work with the SE:V version 1.00 release.

The original purpose of this mod was to supplant the default data files that are provided with Space Empires V with balanced files that retained the spirit of the standard game. A collection of SE:V beta testers participated in its development providing suggestions, comments, and some data files to assist in the development of the Balance Mod. Hopefully the mod addresses most of the issues that take away from the standard SE:V game. And of course, the mod will continue to be updated with SE:V and there is always more work to be done - especially with the AI.

Err, out of curiosity, why wasnt the game 'balanced' to begin with? Is it really that far off? Looking through the list of changes, it appears that quite a bit was changed.

I was really hoping to not have to mod the hell of the game in order to have some semblance of balance. SE4 was pretty awful in its stock form for balance, but I was really hoping that stuff like this would have been a priority for SE5.

The existence of this balance mod answers such questions, I think. It maintains all of the flavor of SE5 stock, but has had a hammer of balance used on it. Though Kwok did most of the work, there was a lot of discussion with other beta testers going into it.

The data is stored in XML files (which you can add new tags to via hooks in the SDK), a lot of the game scripting is done in python files you can change, and much of the core game logic is in a C++ DLL file that there is a SDK for. Almost the entire game can be modified. It's approaching an open source app in terms of how alterable it is.